Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
4th Literature and Cultural Studies Conference: Nautical Narratives”, İzmir, Türkiye, 3 - 05 Mayıs 2023, ss.12-13
No/every man is an island: Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)”
In his most recent film, The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), Martin McDonagh chooses one of the
oldest and most attractive settings of world literature as the location: an island. Situating his story
on an island, McDonagh on the one hand uses the island as a realistic and practical backdrop for
an Irish story; on the other hand, as a strong metaphor for the relationships between the
characters. By doing so, McDonagh revisits one of the oldest philosophical questionings that
occupied the works of many writers and thinkers from John Donne to Carl Jung: whether
humans are separate from one another like islands or inevitably interconnected like the parts of
the same continent. The life of the characters in The Banshees of Inisherin revolves around this
question. This paper aims to analyse the use of island allegory in the film and to elaborate on the
image of water in that allegory. It will be argued that the body of water surrounding the islands is
an element that both unites them and separates them. In the context of The Banshees of Inisherin,
kindness, hostility, suffering, love, art, ideology, faith, fate will be analysed as the components of
this mysterious body of water that both divides and connects the characters.